ISIS Home Base: Raqqa, Syria or Washington, D.C.?
by Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
Sept 30, 2014
While mainstream media outlets in the Western world continue to shill for the White House and NATO’s plans to destroy the Syrian state and oust its democratically elected president, one notable linchpin of propaganda involves the labeling of Raqqa province in Syria as the “home base” of ISIS.
For instance, in an article and video published by the Wall Street Journal , an attempt was made to present “what it’s like to live” inside the “home base” of ISIS. As one might expect, the video paints a terribly bleak picture of the life of women and Syrians in general. Yet the video, as it has been presented by many mainstream outlets, falsely refers to Raqqa as the “home base” of ISIS.
Still, in this video as well as other reports, ISIS is presented as a shadowy group that appeared out of nowhere. For instance, the WSJ states that Raqqa changed in 2014, when ISIS suddenly overran the city and made it “into their home base.”
Yet the reality is that, while Raqqa may have been overtaken by ISIS, it is by no means their “home base.” The truth is that the actual home base of ISIS is located much further away than Raqqa, Syria, or anywhere in Iraq. The reality is that the home base of ISIS is located in Washington, D.C., Langley, VA, London, and other NATO countries that have provided the funding, weaponry, and direction that ISIS has used to conquer Raqqa to begin with.
Who Is ISIS? An open source investigation
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
September 6, 2014
The hysteria over the supposed threat posed by the Islamic State (IS) is now undeniable. Every day new stories emerge focusing on the group’s brutality, its resources, its capabilities and its intention to strike out at the West. The US Defense Secretary, Secretary of State, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ranking Senators have all delivered somber assessments of the group’s evil aims in recent weeks, and have they been joined in that effort by a host of counterparts in foreign nations. The mainstream media, for their part, report these pronouncements without question, and with only a bare minimum of context to help their audience understand the group.
An open source investigation is desperately needed to sort through the hype to determine the facts behind this shadowy terror group. In this article we will examine the background, current status and future aims of the group, as well as the numerous facts that have been carefully omitted from the officially-sanctioned narrative of the group. In the comments section below, Corbett Report members are encouraged to contribute links, analysis and questions to further expand our understanding of the current situation and whether we are in fact heading toward a new false flag provocation like the September 11 attacks. [Not a Corbett Report member? Sign up today.]
Background – History of ISIS
The Islamic State is a caliphate established by a jihadist Islamic group in June 2014. Their expressed goal is to establish Salafist government over the Levant region of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Cyprus and Southern Turkey. The group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been declared caliph and “leader for Muslims everywhere.”
The Islamic State has gone through numerous name changes since its founding in Iraq in 1999. originally known as Jamāʻat al-Tawḥīd wa-al-Jihād (JTJ), (“The Organization of Monotheism and Jihad”), it changed to Tanẓīm Qāʻidat al-Jihād fī Bilād al-Rāfidayn (“The Organization of Jihad’s Base in the Country of the Two Rivers”) in 2004 after the group swore allegiance to Osama Bin Laden. During this period it was popularly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In 2006 it became the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), but changed again in 2013 after expanding into Syria. At that point it became Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Its latest moniker, the “Islamic State,” came about after the proclamation of a new caliphate on June 29, 2014.
Erdogan’s AKP Prepares ISIS Hostage Show
nsnbc international
Aug 4, 2014
AD : Turkey’s AKP government, unable gain the release of 49 Turkish hostages captured by ISIS at the Turkish consulate in Mosul, is preparing a ‘hostage show’ just prior to the 10 August presidential elections.
Many across Turkey have drawn attention to the suspicious timing of the announcement of Turkish Defence Minister İsmet Yılmaz that talks over the Turkish hostages being held by ISIS are ongoing but that the group of 49 could be released today or tomorrow, suggesting that the closeness of this sudden ‘breakthrough’ to the upcoming Turkish presidential election could be too much of a coincidence to be true.
In his statement made in Sivas to members of the press, Yılmaz declared that:
“We are pursuing contacts with all parties in Iraq. We are in contact with everyone who has an influence on ISIS. [The hostages] may come back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. You either carry out an operation to get [the hostages] back, or solve this problem through negotiations with patience. We want to solve the issue through negotiations, because we believe this is the correct way. [The families of the hostages] should have a little more patience.”
At the same time, it has been alleged that the AKP government has prepared a ‘hostage show’ for the run up to the presidential elections should ISIS release the hostages. According to information obtained by Aydınlık, the hostages will be handed over to Peshmerga forces under the control of Massoud Barzani in Mosul, taken to Erbil in the Northern Iraqi Regional Administration before being flown to Ankara where they will be met by Prime Minister and AKP presidential nominee Tayyip Erdoğan.
While preparations have been made for a grand ceremony for when the hostages return to Turkey, families of those captured have held the ruling AKP responsible for the worry and dread they have experienced having not been able to get news of their loved one for 60 days.
The families, who expressed that the AKP government had ordered them “not to speak” and for this reason they remained silent, further conveyed that
“How we have suffered for 60 days. The government didn’t even take precautions against a possible ISIS attack on the consulate. In fact, it was even said one day before ‘Don’t worry, ISIS won’t do anything to you.’ Let our loved ones come to Turkey unharmed, this is what we will declare.”
Related article:
U.S. Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider
MUST READ — America’s Covert Re-Invasion of Iraq

Image: ISIS clearly did not materialize spontaneously within Iraq, it has clearly redeployed from its NATO-sponsored destruction of Syria to northern Iraq, perhaps in an attempt to justify a NATO incursion and the creation of a buffer zone straddling Syrian, Iraqi, and even possibly Iranian territory with the goal of targeting Iran directly with ISIS.
June 13, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci – LD) – Heavily armed, well funded, and organized as a professional, standing army, the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept southward into Iraq from Turkey and northeastern Syria, taking the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, and now threaten the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad itself. The United States was sure to prop up two unfounded narratives – the first being that US intelligence agencies, despite assets in Iraq and above it in the form of surveillance drones, failed to give warning of the invasion, and that ISIS is some sort of self-sustaining terror organization carving out a “state” by “robbing banks” and collecting “donations” on Twitter.
The Wall Street Journal in its report, “Iraqi Drama Catches U.S. Off Guard,” stated:
The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.
In another WSJ post, “U.S. Secretly Flying Drones Over Iraq,” it claimed:
A senior U.S. official said the intelligence collected under the small [secret US drone] program was shared with Iraqi forces, but added: “It’s not like it did any good.” The rapid territorial gains by the Islamist forces loyal to Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, an al Qaeda offshoot, caught the U.S. by surprise, the officials said.
Despite drone flights collecting intelligence, and a 3-year ongoing CIA program (here, here, and here) all along the Turkish-Syrian border to “monitor” and “arm” “moderate” militants fighting the Syrian government, the US claims it was caught “by surprise.” If drones and CIA operatives operating in ISIS territory weren’t enough to detect the impending invasion, perhaps the CIA should have just picked up a newspaper.
Indeed, the Lebanon Daily Start in March 2014 reported that ISIS openly withdrew its forces from Latakia and Idlib provinces in western Syria, and redeployed them in Syria’s east – along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The article titled, “Al-Qaeda splinter group in Syria leaves two provinces: activists,” stated explicitly that:
On Friday, ISIS – which alienated many rebels by seizing territory and killing rival commanders – finished withdrawing from the Idlib and Latakia provinces and moved its forces toward the eastern Raqqa province and the eastern outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo, activists said.
The question remains, if a Lebanese newspaper knew ISIS was on the move eastward, why didn’t the CIA? The obvious answer is the CIA did know, and is simply feigning ignorance at the expense of their reputation to bait its enemies into suspecting the agency of incompetency rather than complicity in the horrific terroristic swath ISIS is now carving through northern Iraq.
Described extensively in the full New Eastern Outlook Journal (NEO) report, “NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion,” the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, have funded and armed terrorists operating in Syria for the past 3 years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – coincidentally the same amount that ISIS would require to gain primacy among militant groups fighting in Syria and to mobilize forces capable of crossing into Iraq and overwhelming Baghdad’s national defenses.
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| Image: The most prominent routes into Syria for foreign fighters is depicted, with the inset graph describing the most widely used routes by foreign fighters on their way to Iraq, as determined by West Point’s 2007 Combating Terrorism Center report “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” (page 20). These same networks were then used to invade and attempt to overthrow the Syrian government itself in 2011, with the addition of a more prominent role for Turkey, and today in 2014, to re-invade Iraq once again. |
The NEO report includes links to the US Army’s West Point Countering Terrorism Center reports, “Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq,” and “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” which detail extensively the terror network used to flood Iraq with foreign terrorists, weapons, and cash to fuel an artificial “sectarian war” during the US occupation, and then turned over to flood Syria with terrorists in the West’s bid to overthrow the government in Damascus.
What’s ISIS Doing in Iraq?
The NEO report would also post Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article, “The Redirection,” documenting over the course of 9 pages US, Saudi, and Israeli intentions to create and deploy sectarian extremists region-wide to confront Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hersh would note that these “sectarian extremists” were either tied to Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda itself. The ISIS army moving toward Baghdad is the final manifestation of this conspiracy, a standing army operating with impunity, threatening to topple the Syrian government, purge pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, and even threatening Iran itself by building a bridge from Al Qaeda’s NATO safe havens in Turkey, across northern Iraq, and up to Iran’s borders directly. Labeled “terrorists” by the West, grants the West plausible deniability in its creation, deployment, and across the broad spectrum of atrocities it is now carrying out.
It is a defacto re-invasion of Iraq by Western interests – but this time without Western forces directly participating – rather a proxy force the West is desperately attempting to disavow any knowledge of or any connection to. However, no other explanation can account for the size and prowess of ISIS beyond state sponsorship. And since ISIS is the clear benefactor of state sponsorship, the question is, which states are sponsoring it? With Iraq, Syria, and Iran along with Lebanese-based Hezbollah locked in armed struggle with ISIS and other Al Qaeda franchises across the region, the only blocs left are NATO and the GCC (Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular).
With the West declaring ISIS fully villainous in an attempt to intervene more directly in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, creating a long desired “buffer zone” within which to harbor, arm, and fund an even larger terrorist expeditionary force, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and others are offered an opportunity to preempt Western involvement and to crush the ISIS – cornering and eliminating NATO-GCC’s expeditionary force while scoring geopolitical points of vanquishing Washington’s latest “villain.” Joint Iraq-Iranian operations in the north and south of ISIS’s locations, and just along Turkey’s borders could envelop and trap ISIS to then be whittled down and destroyed – just as Syria has been doing to NATO’s proxy terrorist forces within its own borders.
Whatever the regional outcome may be, the fact is the West has re-invaded Iraq, with a force as brutal, if not worse than the “shock and awe” doctrine of 2003. Iraq faces another difficult occupation if it cannot summon a response from within, and among its allies abroad, to counter and crush this threat with utmost expediency.
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[related:
VIDEO — Some of John McCain’s Friends: US-Supported Insurgents Humiliate Syrian Old Man in Aleppo
Global Research TV
May 11, 2014
In March 2013 the US-supported insurgent group known as the so-called “Free Syrian Army” abducted the famous “Yellow Man of Aleppo.” The Yellow Man of Aleppo, whose real name is Abu Zakhour, is an old man who is a local celebrity.
When a Syrian journalist asked him, in a 2010 interview, why he wears yellow all the time, the old man responded that he “chose yellow because it’s a color that gives people happiness and joy” whenever they see it. “People loved me from the beginning and I want to repay them that love” by bringing joy into their lives by wearing yellow, he explained. In 2013, his desires to bring joy were met by punishment, physical abuse, verbal abuse and public humiliation when US-supported fighters entered Aleppo.
After abducting Abu Zakhour the insurgent fighters uploaded a video of themselves insulting and tormenting the old man online before he was taken away in their car. The FSA thugs intimidate and force the old man from Aleppo to pretend he supports them and the US-supported insurgency in Syria, to curse President Bashar Al-Assad, and to even bark like a dog and to smile while they slap and hit him multiple times.
These are the criminals that John McCain and the US, UK, French, Turkish, Qatari, Saudi, German, and Canadian government support and want in power.
For more news and articles about the situation in Aleppo and Syria please visit Global Research at http://www.GlobalResearch.ca or click the following link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/indepthr…
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VIDEO — Molotovs, stun grenades explode on Istanbul streets as violence erupts at May Day rally
RT
May 1, 2014
A massive police operation has cracked down on May Day protests in the Turkish city of Istanbul. Defying a ban on May Day protests, hundreds of protesters clashed with police in the Besiktas neighborhood of Istanbul. Some activists threw Molotov cocktails and fireworks at police officers, who retaliated with rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon – READ MORE http://on.rt.com/1u7u7m
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VIDEO — RT crew caught in tear gas and water cannon police attack in Istanbul, Turkey
RT
May 1, 2014
Annual May Day rallies are back and so is the violence. This time Istanbul became the scene of ongoing street battles. Police have attacked a May Day march with tear gas and water cannons. Protesters were seen hurling Molotov cocktails and fireworks at security forces in response. RT’s Sara Firth was caught up in the clashes. Read more: http://on.rt.com/1u7u7m
[related video: Tear gas, water cannon as May Day protesters clash with police in Istanbul]
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